Vive John Oliver

John Oliver delivered a “moment of premium-cable profanity” on Sunday: “First, as of now, we know that this attack was carried out by gigantic fucking assholes.”

HBO

After hearing about the terror attacks in Paris, on Friday, many of us spent the weekend in some combination of grief, shock, and the familiar feeling of trying to reconcile our pleasant or mundane plans—doing some work, visiting with a beloved cousin, getting ready for a birthday party—with thinking about the unspeakable horror, distant but psychically near, that had ruined the lives of countless others. In conversations this weekend, in life and online, what came through was mass sadness, the usual desperate and limited attempts to understand what had happened, who had done it, and why. On social media, people in Paris posted that they were heartbroken but all right; Americans, and others, overlaid their Facebook photographs with the tricolor. People posted photographs of themselves smiling in front of the Eiffel Tower, images from “Madeline” and “Le Petit Prince,” clips from “Children of Paradise” and “Casablanca”— the “Marseillaise” scene, of course—and photographs of everything from One World Trade to the Sydney Opera House to the Burj Khalifa lit with blue, white, and red lights. Some pointed out, rightly, that the terrorist attacks in Beirut the day before had not received the same attention in the Western press or in the public’s response. Others pointed out, rightly, that some of these observations amounted to criticizing people for grieving.

On Sunday, France started bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. People everywhere argued about Syria, ISIS, refugees, 9/11 and the U.S. response to it, Islam, prejudice, immigration, extremism, and the cycle of violence and fear that continues to churn. A man at a Packers-Lions game yelled “Muslims suck!” during a moment of silence for the terror victims, and a quarterback criticized him for it. (“It’s that kind of prejudicial ideology that, I think, puts us in the position that we’re in today, as a world.”) You might have found yourself moved by some friends’ responses, annoyed by others (everything from self-important to completely unfazed), frustrated at yourself for being so powerless and inept in the grand scheme of things, and exhausted by your own millions of opinions and micro-opinions.

If you happened to be up late watching John Oliver before bed, you, like me, might have found yourself laughing and crying, having the first cathartic emotional response you’d had since Friday, and grateful for it.

“Look, it’s hardly been forty-eight hours, and much is still unknown,” Oliver said at the beginning of his show, “Last Week Tonight.” “But there are a few things we can say for certain. And this is where it actually helps to be on HBO, where those things can be said without restraint.” What HBO could help him provide, he said, was a “moment of premium-cable profanity”: a gift that HBO has provided many great works, and which should be commended. Oliver is a master of tone and timing—I’ve often marvelled that the show’s writing is so well suited to his voice, and that he’s so skilled at delivering it, that he seems to be thinking aloud, just talking, when he’s actually performing an aria of high-grade “Thick of It”-style sweary indignation. He’s part news anchor, part gleeful nerd—a formula that’s almost scientific in its ability to deliver hard-core information with chasers of wit. In this, however, he was just giving us a kind of release.

“So here is where things stand. First, as of now, we know that this attack was carried out by gigantic fucking assholes, unconscionable, flaming assholes, possibly, possibly working with other fucking assholes, definitely working in service of an ideology of pure assholery,” he said. His audience began to laugh. “Second, and this goes almost without saying, Fuck these assholes!” The audience began to cheer. “Fuck them, if I may say, sideways!” He made some definitive hand gestures. Third, he said, nothing these assholes attempt is going to work. “France is going to endure. And I’ll tell you why. If you are in a war of culture and life style with France, good fucking luck!” More cheering. “Go ahead, go ahead. Bring your bankrupt ideology. They’ll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Gauloises cigarettes, Camus, Camembert, madeleines, macarons”—images of these appeared behind him as he spoke—“Marcel Proust, and the fucking croquembouche!” An image of what looked like a glazed-cream-puff Christmas tree popped up. He waved his hands and pointed at it. “The croquembouche! You just brought a philosophy of rigorous self-abnegation to a pastry fight, my friends. You are fucked! That is a French freedom tower!” The crowd howled with delight.

For clarity of expression and comedic effectiveness, John Oliver’s show may be the best and purest show on television—the most useful satire, the highest satisfaction-to-filler ratio of anything we’ve got. It takes the best of the “Daily Show” and “Nightly Show” model—brilliant satirical writing, a sharp point of view, a strong voice, deep empathy, righteous outrage—and lacks those shows’ uneven desk bits, field interviews, guest conversations, and group hangs, which can either work well and bring valuable insights or, more often, feel like strained concessions to old TV formats that hope to please a mass audience. “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” gives us a Colbert freed from the limitations of his ingenious pundit character but coöperating with the demands of the mass market. “Last Week Tonight,” on HBO—free from all of that, and from the many-episodes-a-week grind, and able to swear willy-nilly—is able to offer something focussed and wonderful: a glorious croquembouche of profanity, fury, silliness, and intelligence that we didn’t know we needed until it arrived and wouldn’t want to do without. It has comedic authority and moral intelligence that can help fill the Jon Stewart-shaped hole in our lives—providing a good laugh-sob to help maintain sanity, and maybe even a decent Sunday night’s sleep, so that on Monday morning we can get back to trying to figure it all out.

Sarah Larson is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her column, Podcast Dept., appears on newyor­ker.com.